Time to open presents

How exciting is this time of the year? Christmas is the season of gift giving. The time has come to gather round the proverbial Christmas tree and hand out the gifts. This year’s tree is a beautiful blue spruce. Oops, maybe not. I see now it’s a beetle kill tree from the Medicine Bow National Forest painted over. How nice of someone to keep us from thinking about that nasty climate change at this festive time of the year.

Well let’s get right to the presents. 

Ah look. The first one is for the Wyoming legislature. They say good things come in small packages. It’s a small bit of compassion. How wonderful. Legislators can certainly use it.

There are approximately 18,000 low-income people in this state who have been denied health insurance and access to healthcare only because they found themselves collateral damage in a partisan contest between Republicans and President Obama. With this little gift of compassion, perhaps enough legislators will be able to rise above all of that and actually take care of their constituents. I do hope the package is big enough.

Oh and here’s a gift for the taxpayers of Wyoming. It’s a gift from the Wyoming Department of Health. But the tag says, “Do not open until Medicaid is expanded.” If Medicaid is expanded, the taxpayers of Wyoming will receive a gift of ten-of-millions of dollars in health care, cost savings, and new jobs.

And who is this gift for? Oh, The Wyoming Liberty Group. It’s a beautiful new custom fly rod. Too bad most of them won’t be able to buy a resident fishing license for a while. But then with all that Texas money, they can afford the non-resident license. Good fishing. By the way, I hear some folks are actually taking your bait.

Did anybody get anything for WyWatch? These are the folks who use the Bible to foist their narrow religious views on everyone else. The problem is that their “views” come from a self-serving and erroneous reading of the Old Testament.

So this gift is perfect for my “Old-Testament-Christian” friends. It’s a Bible that includes the New Testament. That will certainly come in handy. I know they’re more comfortable using misinterpreted judgments of the Old Testament to lobby on behalf of inequality and discrimination. This gift will bring them out of their comfort zone.

Now that they have a Bible that includes the New Testament, they’ll be able to read the words of Jesus. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” for example.

Ah, here’s a package for State Senator Charlie Scott. It feels like a framed picture. Ah it is! Look. It is a photo of Charlie with his boyhood friend Methuselah. It says the photo was taken on Methuselah’s 969^th birthday, shortly before the Great Flood and a few weeks before Charlie was elected to his first term in the legislature. What a keepsake. The inscription reads, “Term limits are for sissies! Love, Methuselah.”

Here’s a package for CROW, the Conservative Republicans of Wyoming. Listen. Do you hear a ticking sound? Oh my. I see now. It’s not for CROW. It’s FROM CROW. Maybe we ought to have the bomb squad open this one.

Wait just a minute. Didn’t anyone get anything for the Governor? I thought about it but figured he’d already gotten his present on Election Day. Getting another four years to finally do something is gift enough. Wait there is one more present under the tree. It is for the Governor.

Shake it. Oh my. There are a couple of round things rolling around in the package. What could they be? Let’s read the note. Oh, it’s not what I thought. The note says, “For Governor Mead, two lumps of coal. You deserved a whole sack but EPA regulations allowed only for these two small chunks.”

I’d have bought a present for the voters of Wyoming but decided they have all they’re going to get and deserve whatever it is.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Fictional characters CAN win

A headline in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle the day before this month’s general election brought a smile. “Fictional characters can’t win Wyoming elections.”

The smile disappeared the next day next day when voters actually elected a fictional character to the state House of Representatives. Harlan Edmunds is now a state legislator. Only a “fictional character” makes his living off the government while moonlighting as an anti-government activist and publicly trashes legislators prior to running for the office himself.

The Wyoming Tribune-Eagle endorsed Lee Filer, Edmunds opponent, because the editorial board found it “hard to consider Mr. Edmonds a serious candidate.”

We’ll soon learn whether Edmunds is a serious legislator. 

Harlan is a state employee who openly expresses disdain for government. He is equally clear in his disdain for more than a few of those fellow Republicans he now joins in the legislature.

As the founder of CROW (Conservative Republicans of Wyoming) Edmunds solicited others to provide “evidence of Republican misconduct, from deliberate efforts to undermine conservative persons, principles, organizations, or legislation, to violations of trust or law, or other ethical problems” so that he might investigate them.

On his website, the Republican legislator-elect crowed, “As a part of CROW’s mission to recruit and elect conservative Republican leaders, it may become necessary to identify liberal Republican officials for removal, either for purposes of rehabilitation or permanent retirement from any position of trust within the Republican Party.”

He made no bones that among those “liberal Republicans” are Governor Mead, state senator Charlie Scott, and others with whom he will uneasily caucus.  Edmunds claimed on the WyWatch website that we “are engaged in a great civil war” and that Matt Mead and other GOP elected officials are on the wrong side of the battle line. www.wywatch.org

He calls the Republican-dominated state capitol “a RINO (Republican-in-name-only) petting zoo.”www.wyomingnews.com/articles/2013/10/10/opinion/guest_column.

Edmunds pounced on Wyoming’s all-GOP congressional delegation, citing their “reluctance to fight as often and as visibly as the rising conservative fire-eaters. For Edmunds, the latter are folks like Ted Cruz.

It’s not only legislative colleagues on the receiving end of Edmund’s rhetorical strafing. He viciously shelled the lobbyists with whom he’ll now have to work.

In a WyWatch website editorial, Edmunds called the Capitol Club “a sort of subterranean scupper-hole” where a “hive of lobbyists” meet to “begin their quest to cajole legislators either to ‘fence-in’ their employer’s interests or to ‘fence-out’ their employer’s competition.”

Capitol Club members are professionals who lobby the legislature. Their mission, per their website, is “to promote, among its membership, the highest standards of responsible, professional lobbying before the Wyoming State Legislature in order to affect timely and beneficial public policy for the state of Wyoming, its businesses and citizens.” Most responsible observers believe they fulfill that mission.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve never used the term “scupper-hole.” Google defines “scupper holes” as foot and tank wells in the beds of kayaks, which allow water coming over the deck of the kayak to automatically drain out.

Hopefully at least one member of the Capitol Club, the vast majority of whom are Republicans, will inquire. What the heck did Edmunds mean comparing them to a “subterranean scupper-hole?” Context makes clear the term wasn’t intended to compliment these men and women for the contributions they make to the legislative process.

It’ll be entertaining to watch Edmunds rubbing shoulders with people he disdains. Those who elected him may get a lesson on the importance of their vote if they watch him advance his extreme personal agenda, not as a commentator, but as a legislator.

Edmonds is a Wyoming Department of Transportation employee but believes Wyoming should become self-sufficient, rejecting all federal funding. He’ll have an opportunity to propose replacing WDOT federal funds with state dollars.

Edmunds can either throw CROW-bombs from the cheap seats or do the hard work of representing all of his constituents, but he cannot do both.

We’ll know by the end of the coming session whether Harlan Edmunds is a serious legislator or just another fictional character.

The Good Samaritan-Sagebrush Gospel Version

Just then a Wyoming legislator stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to have eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law? You wrote the law. You should know what is required. What do you read there?”

The lawmaker answered,  "It’s the Code of the West. Live each day with courage; take pride in your work; always finish what you start; do what has to be done; be tough, but fair; when you make a promise, keep it; ride for the brand; talk less, say more; remember that some things are not for sale; and know where to draw the line.”

Jesus said to him, “You’ve given the right answers; do these things and you’ll be known as a son of Wyoming.”

Wanting to justify himself, the legislator asked Jesus, “If we are to do what has to be done, tell me teacher, what is that? Where do we ‘draw the line?”

Jesus replied with a parable, “A gay man was going down from Muddy Gap to Rawlins, and fell into the hands of bigots, who beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.

Now a lobbyist for WyWatch was going down that road, headed to Cheyenne; when she saw him she passed on the other side saying, “I have no time to help you. I must hurry to Cheyenne to protect the sanctity of life and marriage, and oppose early childhood education. Besides, helping you would only further the gay agenda, whatever that is.”

Likewise a CROW came and saw him, passing by quickly on the other side of the road, hollering over his shoulder at the wounded man, “I’d help but I don’t believe in creating a culture of dependency.” Then he scurried away mumbling something about drug testing people like him and how he should have armed himself if he didn’t want to end up like that and that he was probably a liberal or RINO anyway.

But an undocumented Samaritan who was traveling to a job no one in Wyoming would take but people like him, came near the wounded man; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds. Then he put him in the front seat of his old pick-up, and brought him to an inn near Bairoil, though he knew doing so increased the risk of being arrested and deported by the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The next day he took out one hundred of his own hard-earned dollars, about a week’s pay, and gave every penny to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’

As he left, the innkeeper knew what had to be done and where to draw the line and that no good deed should ever go unpunished. So he promptly called to report the Good Samaritan to ICE.

Jesus then turned to the legislator and asked, “Which of these do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the bigots?” The legislator said, “The one who rode for the brand, of course.”

“And who was that,” asked Jesus.  “Obviously it was the innkeeper,” said the legislator!

Jesus said to him, “That’s not who I had in mind. Since you all like to say Heaven is a local call from Wyoming, you ought to call me now and then.” Jesus said, “No. The man’s neighbor was actually the one who showed him mercy; the undocumented Samaritan who is now sitting in a for-profit detention center in Georgia waiting to be deported.”

Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise, be merciful to the wounded.”  But the legislator was sad at these words, and went away sorrowful, for he knew he could never sell that idea to his base.

And that’s the Sagebrush Gospel. You can look it up…Luke 10.

Has the Wyoming GOP become too liberal for you?

Been worried that the Wyoming Republican Party has gotten too liberal?  Alas, somebody is doing something about it. The CROWs (Conservative Republicans of Wyoming) are coming to the rescue. CROW has a website (crowyoming.org) and has begun issuing hunting licenses for RINO’s. Not the African jungle kind. These RINOs are “Republicans in name only.” CROW has sited them wandering the halls of the legislature, dressed in GOP garb, but voting like liberal, godless Democrats.

RINOs have no principles according to CROW. But the CROWs have their own. Excuse my paraphrase…God is great, Man is not, government is bad, the family, only as defined by CROW, is more important than any individual, government exists only to fight wars, keep “those people” (my words) out and to protect life beginning, as determined by those who disdain science, at conception. CROW will assure laws are passed at the lowest common denominator, “a rigorously originalist interpretation of the United States Constitution” and prohibit government from doing anything for anyone that they should be doing for themselves.

And the one I find most darkly entertaining: “That the genius of Western Civilization, manifested by and through its enduring faith, principles and wisdom, inherited and refined through the long historical experience of successive generations, constitutes an unsurpassed spiritual, philosophical and cultural endowment that is worthy of defense and perpetuation.”

These rights are to be protected through “vigilance by an armed, informed, and involved citizenry.”

“Armed, informed, and involved.” I can’t get the image of Elmer Fudd out of my head. Elmer's hat, gun and signature catchphrase, "Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wabbits.” CROW is “hunting winos,” I mean RINOs.  They are, as all hunters should be, very serious about it. From crowwyoming.org. “RINO Hunters: As a part of CROW’s mission to recruit and elect conservative Republican leaders, it may become necessary to identify liberal Republican officials for removal, either for purposes of rehabilitation or permanent retirement from any position of trust within the Republican Party.”

“Liberal Republican officials”? They’re about as plentiful on the Wyoming plains as Jackalopes. But, they will be found and removed. If they cannot be rehabilitated, they will be retired. Sounds like what happened to Khrushchev?

The CROWs website assures all “removals” will be conducted with “due process.” “CROW has amassed extensive documentation of Republican elected officials and Party officers who have deliberately undermined fellow Republicans, conservative legislation, and conservative principles in general.” You know who you are. Turn your self if you know what’s good for you.

If you want to become a CROW it’s not easy. “Membership in CROW is by invitation only, and contingent upon the completion of a signed affirmation of conservative understanding and intent.”

The CROWs seek to assure the purity of their membership. Before you get your decoder ring and learn the secret handshake, you’ll need at least three other CROWs to vouch for your conservative credentials. Even then you don’t receive your hooded robe until you are voted in at a secret meeting of the politburo.

Never fear. You can still participate in the RINO hunt. “CROW members and non-members alike are encouraged to submit their evidence of such things” i.e. RINOs in Elephant costumes. So if any of the fellow travelers have any dope on any of the traitors, submit it.

To paraphrase that great American Joe McCarthy (who was certainly not a RINO), “I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to CROW as being members of the RINO Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the Wyoming state legislature.”

Like Looney Tunes, the GOP primary should be great fun to watch. The CROWs vs. The RINOs. Elmer vs. Buggs. "Oh, you dubbuh-cwossing winos! You tweachewous miscweants!"

For more information, a hunting license and your own Elmer Fudd hat, contact CROW at Conservative Republicans of Wyoming,
P.O. Box 2684, 
Cheyenne, WY… zip code e-i-e-i-o.